Friday, June 23, 2017

A Department of Homeland
Security official on Wednesday told the Senate Intelligence Committee that
Russian government-backed hackers targeted as many as 21 states during the 2016
presidential election.

…DHS failed to
share critical information with states about specific threat information that
needed to be acted upon, such as the Russian hackers' targeting of 21 states,
said Kay Stimson, spokesperson for the NASS.

"The general feedback we received from today's
hearing," she told the E-Commerce Times, "is that state officials are
very interested in receiving documented threat intelligence information from
DHS so they can use that to protect their systems."

…"Advertisers
consider their ad creatives and their ad targeting strategy to be competitively
sensitive and confidential," Rob Sherman, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy
officer, said in an interview with Reuters.

"In many cases, they'll ask us, as a condition of
running ads on Facebook, not to disclose those details about how they're
running campaigns on our service.

…Political
science researchers have been asking the company for information on political
advertising, like how it’s targeted, how much money is spent and how many
people are engaging with the messages.

According to Reuters, President Trump’s campaign spent $70
million on Facebook digital ads; he has credited the social media site for
helping him win the election.

Didn’t Tom Clancy write about this a few years ago?Something to file under Ethical Hacking.

WikiLeaks published several
documents on Thursday detailing a tool allegedly used by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to hack air-gapped networks through USB drives.

Dubbed “Brutal Kangaroo,”
it has been described by its developer as a tool suite designed for targeting
closed networks. The infected systems will form a covert network, and the
attacker will be able to obtain information and execute arbitrary files.

How should I take this?Is TSA saying it can’t identify anything with these scanners they are so
hot to install everywhere? They never
make clear why this is needed.

On Thursday, the
department, working with Google, will introduce a $1.5
million contest to build computer algorithms that can automatically
identify concealed items in images captured by checkpoint body scanners.

Out of the goodness in their hearts or because their
lawyers are worried about lawsuits?

Alphabet
Inc.’s Google has quietly decided to scrub an entire category of online
content — personal medical records — from its search results, a departure from
its typically hands-off approach to policing the web.

Google lists the information it
removes from its search results on its policy page. On
Thursday, the website added the line: “confidential, personal medical records
of private people.” A Google spokeswoman
confirmed the changes do not affect search advertising but declined to comment
further.

I’m glad to see this, of course, but if you find personal
medical information on the web, remember that you need to/should do more than
just Google to de-index it, as the material will still be accessible on the web
to those who know where to or how to look for it. Be sure to contact the site or webmaster to
alert them that they are exposing confidential medical information.

And if that fails to get results, you can file a complaint
with state or federal regulators – or just go to the media to see if any local
news station might be interested in picking up the story and getting involved
with it.

Part of a trend to let users see only the content they are
comfortable with.

…Tumblr’s
Safe Mode is an extension of the Safe Search function that’s been around
for several years now. As its name
suggests Safe Search filters sensitive content from search results. Safe Mode
also filters sensitive content from your Dashboard, meaning you won’t see it at
all ever.

With Safe Mode enabled you won’t see any content Tumblr
has deemed to be sensitive in nature. Instead
you’ll see a gray screen with a message informing you, “This post may contain
sensitive media”. If you click View Post
you can bypass this screen and see the content hidden beneath.

Tumblr is likely to face the usual claims of censorship. In practical terms it is censoring sensitive
content, but only if the user opts in by choice. The exception are users under the age of 18,
who will be opted in to using Safe Mode by default whether they like it or not.
However, users can simply lie about
their age when registering their account in order to circumvent this.

Digital security and due process: A new legal framework for
the cloud era

For as long as we’ve had legal systems, prosecutors and
police have needed to gather evidence. And
for each new advance in communications, law enforcement has adapted. With the advent of the post office, police got
warrants to search letters and packages. With the arrival of telephones, police served subpoenas
for the call logs of suspects. Digital
communications have now gone well beyond the Postal Service and Ma Bell. But the laws that govern evidence-gathering on
the internet were written before the Information Revolution, and are now both
hindering the flow of information to law enforcement and jeopardizing user
privacy as a result.

These rules are due for a fundamental realignment in light
of the rapid growth of technology that relies on the cloud, the very real
security threats that face people and communities, and the expectations of
privacy that internet users have in their communications.

Today, we’re proposing a new framework
that allows countries that commit to baseline privacy, human rights, and due
process principles to gather evidence more quickly and efficiently

Ten years ago, Jeanne Harris and I published the book Competing on Analytics, and we’ve just finished updating it
for publication in September. One major
reason for the update is that analytical
technology has changed dramatically over the last decade; the
sections we wrote on those topics have become woefully out of date. So revising our book offered us a chance to
take stock of 10 years of change in analytics.

…Since much of
big data is relatively unstructured, data scientists created ways to make it
structured and ready for statistical analysis, with new (and old) scripting
languages like Pig, Hive, and Python. More-specialized
open source tools, such as Spark for streaming data and R for statistics, have
also gained substantial popularity. The
process of acquiring and using open source software is a major change in itself
for established businesses.

U.S. startup Civic has sold $33 million in digital
currency tokens for its identity verification project in a public sale, the
company's co-founder and Chief Executive Vinny Lingham told Reuters.

The sale is the latest
so-called initial coin offering (ICO), in which creators of digital currencies sell tokens to the public in order to
finance their projects, in a similar way that companies raise money
with an initial public offering, except there is no
regulatory oversight.

A contradictory report allows you to argue both sides of
the question.

“This year’s report reveals new
insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over
70,000 online news consumers in 36 countries including the US and UK. The report focuses on the issues of trust in
the era of fake news, changing business models and the role of platforms. This year’s report comes amid intense
soul-searching in the news industry about fake news, failing business models,
and the power of platforms. And yet our
research casts new and surprising light on some of the prevailing narratives
around these issues.

The internet and social media may have exacerbated
low trust and ‘fake news’, but we find that in many countries the
underlying drivers of mistrust are as much to do with deep-rooted
political polarisation and perceived mainstream media bias.

Echo chambers and filter bubbles are undoubtedly real
for some, but we also find that – on average – users of social media,
aggregators, and search engines experience more diversity than
non-users.

With data covering more than 30 countries and five
continents, this research is a reminder that the digital revolution is full of
contradictions and exceptions. Countries
started in different places, and are not moving at the same pace. These differences are captured in individual
country pages that can be found towards the end of this report. They contain critical industry context written
by experts – as well as key charts and data points…”

…1.5 billion
logged in viewers visit YouTube every single month. That’s the equivalent of one in every five
people around the world! And how much do
those people watch? On average, our
viewers spend over an hour a day watching YouTube on mobile devices alone.

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About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.